Posted
by
kdawson
on Wednesday November 25, 2009 @08:14AM
from the sun-is-setting-fast dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The European Union has managed to do something that US Presidents often find difficult: to make 59 US Senators from both sides of the aisle agree on something. A group led by John Kerry (D) and Orrin Hatch (R) has sent a letter to the European Union, asking it to wrap up the investigation of the Oracle-Sun merger and let the deal go through. Interestingly, the letter emphasizes the damage the delay and uncertainty are doing to Sun." The article paraphrases a Gartner analyst, who points out that the Senators' letter "comes from a US point of view and doesn't take into account how the EU operates."

"The DoJ runs on completely different competition rules than the EU," he said. "The DoJ looks at where there is harm to consumers. Their decision is businesses can look after themselves. The EU is more likely to be protective of competitors. They believe trade is better with more small competitors."

I was interested by that part of the article as well. What's wrong with encouraging fewer monolith corporations and more small competitors? However, I don't see how that philosophy plays into the Sun/Oracle situation. Two years from now we will either have a single Oracle/Sun company or a single Oracle company.

Honestly, I think that Sun would have been just as ripe a takeover target for Cisco, who has been recently expanding into the server space. Buying Sun would get them an instant, firm beachhead, as well as merging two companies with highly complementary product lines. Cisco's high end networking gear plus Sun's high performance server line make for an excellent one-stop data center shop for people who don't want to compromise on equipment quality.

Other possible buyers of Sun could be any high end network equipment OEM that's cashed up. If Apple wanted to enter the lucrative server space, acquiring Sun would be a good start, as they have a similar hardware+software as a platform culture. Apple has some server products out there, so presumably they want to at least have a presence, and Sun would be a great way to turn "kind of exists in the space" into "major player in the space".

Oracle+Sun doesn't make sense from a hardware point of view, I just don't see Oracle branded servers happening. From a DB point of view it makes even less sense to me. Oracle is just buying up its most threatening competition with no real apparent strategy.

Personally, I think it's competition elimination, and the DoJ was insane to allow it through. The EU is right to block it. There are better suitors for Sun that are more likely to result in a stronger product range for consumers.

You seem not to know much about the Hardware Sun is selling and the Software Oracle is selling;D

Oracle+Sun doesn't make sense from a hardware point of view, I just don't see Oracle branded servers happening. From a DB point of view it makes even less sense to me. Oracle is just buying up its most threatening competition with no real apparent strategy.

I would estimate that in germany 90% of the Oracle installations run on Sun hardware. In fact I never have met Sun hardware where not Oracle was involved som

Two years from now we will either have a single Oracle/Sun company or a single Oracle company.

Only if you believe that a company the size of Sun can disappear in a puff of smoke.:-)

Sure, Sun would probably go bancrupt. The profitable parts (and some non-profitable, but believed to be profitable or able to be made profitable) would be sold off. A bunch of employees would start their own "Sun 2". Consulting firms would step in to take over maintainance contracts.

Two years from now we will either have a single Oracle/Sun company or a single Oracle company.

Only if you believe that a company the size of Sun can disappear in a puff of smoke.:-)

Sure, Sun would probably go bancrupt. The profitable parts (and some non-profitable, but believed to be profitable or able to be made profitable) would be sold off. A bunch of employees would start their own "Sun 2". Consulting firms would step in to take over maintainance contracts.

Interesting stuff happens when the old dog leaves the barn, you know?

of course they can... remember DEC? Digital was going up in a puff of smoke until Compaq acquired the remains.

if the deal does not go through, or if it never happened, it's simplistic to think that sun would just "go away". sun software as a whole is flourishing. the losing aspect is sun hardware.

a more likely scenario is that parts of sun would emerge from bankruptcy and move forward with their profitable ways. or better yet, mr. poneytail acts proactively to re-organize sun into a profitable formation.

That quote is rather bizarre. It seems to be implying that having a market utterly dominated by a few large companies instead of being composed of many smaller, less individually influential ones isn't harmful to consumers.

I'm talking about the "The DoJ looks at where there is harm to consumers" part of the quote. He's saying the EU is "completely different" from the DoJ and the DoJ would never do this (being concerned about keeping the market full of lots of small competitors), thus implying that he thinks that a lack of competition is not harmful to consumers. Or perhaps he was just very bad with words and meant to say that the DoJ only deals with stuff it thinks harms consumers (not that objectively harms consumers), and t

We're currently in the situation that the biggest software firm in the world has a hard time delivering an operating system that surpasses the offerings of both a very small competitor and a bunch of hippies with computers (slight exaggeration). Yet the ubiquitous presence of Microsoft operating systems, even in places where they are very clearly not a technological fit, is untouched, and the price of Microsoft software keeps rising to levels where the retail price is almost twice the price of the hardware. This is not economics of scale at work. This is monopolistic marketing resulting in prices which are not justifiable by product quality. Another example: Microsoft is the reason why netbooks are almost exclusively sold with no more than 1GB of RAM and hard disks no bigger than 160GB, despite RAM and hard disk capacity being dirt cheap anywhere else. The price of the package is such that the full price of the Microsoft OS would make it unattractive, but the reduced licensing costs dictate these restrictions on RAM and HD capacity. Microsoft is actively holding back the development of mobile computing because they're not ready for it, and they can only do so because they're in a monopoly position.

We're currently in a situation where the low hanging fruit of operating system design has pretty much all been plucked. There haven't been very many major advances in Operating Systems in quite some time. The only reason why Linux appears to be moving ahead more rapidly is because its UI was previously so abysmally poor, and UI Is what is most apparent to people actually using the system. That's not to say that Linux is bad, or Microsoft is good, or Apple or anyone else for that matter. I'm just saying that

Odd that you think that. As much as I would love to agree with you I can't. I had a netbook given to me, and try as I might I can't get rid of it. Even my wife who rarely uses computers at home is constantly grabbing the netbook. Why? Very simple because it is convenient and ties very well into the "cloud" life style. A netbook is the ideal marriage between the notebook, and the mobile device. I have a smart phone, and small netbook and still have a netbook. And this netbook runs Linu

by netbooks? Granted the netbooks re-directed the notebook market. INHO netbooks forced VISTA to be re-focused in Windows 7 to be somewhat efficient and smaller, (since MS had to continue XP until something from MS that ran on netbooks was available) so if you wanted more OS bloat then yeah netbooks held back the market. It is clear the market was headed toward the MAC route, IE more bloated (but powerful) software needing more bloated hardware to have everything at a price (>=$1000). T

Apple sells computers, which include an operating system, and which has specific benefits and flaws when compared to other operating systems.

Some people like the functionality of the Windows OSs.

Some people like the functionality of Linux OSs.

Some people like the functionality of OSX.

And some people are offended so highly and so badly affected by groupthink that they're reduced to profanity when explaining how they chose to purchase the obsolete technology which best fits their needs.

I gave Ubuntu a try and after 6 months willingly chose to buy Windows XP.

FWIW I used a couple of different flavours of Linux as my desktop OS for a couple of years at work, before finally switching to XP. I made an informed decision too, and have recently upgraded my home PC to Windows 7.

It annoys me when some people here assume that everyone using Windows is doing so only because they know no better; for some of us, it really is the right tool for th

You missed an important fact: We're not looking at market economics. Microsoft is a monopoly. It can set the prices at will (within the bound created by the cost that a would-be competitor would incur overcoming Microsoft's monopolistic status). This also means that Microsoft can (and does) use its monopolistic profit to maintain its status by undercutting attempts of competition. The smart phone market is an excellent example, because it takes a free competitor to dislodge the abomination that is Windows M

Well first, your suggestion is utterly asinine. If you break their OS division into a bunch of companies and have them each develop their own fork of Windows, you won't get a bunch of new OSes magically, you'll get a bunch of slightly different forks of Windows. And then they probably find some way to work together to avoid pointless duplication of effort. Everyone's software will still work on all the new Windows forks, so there'll be no reason for developers to make their applications portable. And still

Please lets us do our fucking business, and you do your fucking business for once of controlling your banks so they don't blow up the world economy, for the Xth time. We all know what happened last time the US argued for LESS government oversight.

"The DoJ runs on completely different competition rules than the EU," he said. "The DoJ looks at where there is harm to consumers. Their decision is businesses can look after themselves. The EU is more likely to be protective of competitors. They believe trade is better with more small competitors."

And what exactly is the difference between those two "approaches"? As a citizen of the EU and germany I never have heared about this standpoint anyway. The point is to prevent a monopoly. Wether you look at that

Based on that logic, the DoJ cleared the merger simply because neither Oracle nor Sun sells "consumer" products. Generally, consumers are considered to be real people that purchase goods or services for personal consumption. It would be hard to show harm to consumers since the impact on them by this merger would be so indirect.

When is the last time little Suzie wanted better support for her Sun laptop? When has your spouse ever called out "Honey! The Oracle man is here to setup our media center!"

>>>as I stare at my AT&T bill and ponder how humpty dumpty Ma Bell was put back together again, and why I still can't get FiOS, is that the EU tells King Kong NIMBY - to the benefit of emerging open source service markets there.>>>

Ma Bell has not been recreated. Ma Bell was a monopoly, whereas today you have many choices for your long distance service. You can even change companies on a whim, simply by buying a competitors' calling card (I have AT&T long distance but my calling c

I think it is more like the EU would prefer a few large European companies and smaller non-European competitors. If this was SAP buying Sun, it would have been approved months ago.

Yes it would have been approved months ago, but not for the reason you mention. It would have gone through as SAP does not produce a major product in the database market.

The European Competition Commission did not block the sale of MySQL to Sun. That was a big American company buying a smaller European company. They are now questioning (with good reason) whether the number of major players in the Database market should be reduced as Oracle gain even more dominance. Now in an ideal world the sale would have been turned down in the US, but the problem is that SUN may not survive on its own so it has to be taken over by someone. It is currently losing $100 million a month (http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-10379673-92.html).

This is what the US senators are trying to get over to the EU. They are desperately hoping that all the Sun employees in the US do not go adding to the high unemployment there already. However the European Commission has the opposite worry: They are probably very concerned that MySQL will be wound up by Oracle who see it as undercutting there flagship database product. This will contribute heavily to European unemployment instead. Even if the MySQL product continues I cannot see why you would not start to rationalise the development of both products and try and get the two teams more entwined. I know the two products are very different, but the skillset of two teams must be similar and it would be an obvious way to cut SUN's overheads since the majority of the development is community lead anyway. They would try and tempt some Lead MySQL dev's to the states then just cut the rest loose since most of the non-open source parts of MySQL are the parts aimed at enterprise that probably do not sit very well with Oracle anyway.

Ultimately it is highly unlikely that the sale will be blocked, but it is more likely that Oracle may be forced to sell the MySQL division or their existing InnoDB division as a condition of this purchase. I would be quite happy to InnoDB and MySQL rolled into one then sold. This is probably highly unlikely though.

I've said this before [slashdot.org], and I'll say it again: Why does Oracle need mySQL?

If there's no reasonable answer, and Oracle refuses to spin it off, it clearly shows monopolistic intent, and the EU is rightfully worried.

Just because 59 Senators got off their asses doesn't mean that Oracle should get to buy all the marbles. Spin off MySQL and profit from it, Larry, or watch as your investment dwindles and you contribute to local unemployment, just because you believe everyone else must fail [amazon.com].

Only if MySQL was the only other DB left. Its not even the only large DB left.
There's still Microsoft SQL, and I don't think Oracle will kill that beast that quickly.
There are also plenty of other DB's available.
MySQL can already fork its current state, so I would ask, why does the EU need the trademark of MySQL to remain outside the influence of Oracle?

They are now questioning (with good reason) whether the number of major players in the Database market should be reduced as Oracle gain even more dominance.

Actually it turns out the complainants claiming that MySQL must be protected are Microsoft, who would love to see both Sun and MySQL die, and SAP, who just want anything that will hurt a competitor. Neither of them know or care that we're talking about:

free software, which can and has been forked, and

a company who bought a supposed competitor, InnoDB, and invested money improving it.

I think it is more like the EU would prefer a few large European companies and smaller non-European competitors. If this was SAP buying Sun, it would have been approved months ago.

Bu you do know that the law in europe is for everyone the same? We have no money aristocraty e.g.... if SAP would buy Sun teh concerns would even be much higher and the decision would probably already be made.

This is nothing more than the EU protecting a European company from stiffer competition.

Selection bias. When the EC recently ordered the breakup of two of the world's largest financial institutions (one of which was the largest in the world), you didn't hear about it, because they are based in the Netherlands and the UK and don't make gadgets. As such it's not news that's relevant to slashdot or any other American media, or so you will never hear about it.

The same story with european grocery giants, beer giants, engineering giants and petroleum companies that have been investigated or sanctioned by the EC. By definition, you will never hear about it unless the target is a multinational based in the US, because you have no reason to read foreign media.

I actually do think the EC anti trust office has overused its power under the current commissioner, especially when it comes to dismantling banks, but there is no evidence for any bias based on countries; the harshest measures have been against European companies.

The grocery, beer, and other cases aren't exactly relevant here. In this case, letting Oracle buy Sun they would create a bigger and more powerful direct competitor to the largest European software company, SAP. This is not the case with something like groceries, where non-EU presence is quite limited anyway.

I guess as an employee of SAP I should be happy with the decision, but I don't care too much and think this decision is a pretty stupid one. Yeah, I don't by the MySQL argument either. Worst case scenar

"PS. The harshest measures so far were against US companies. Does Intel and Microsoft mean anything to you?"

Might this have something to do with the fact that US companies have different strategies and simply do not want to change their ways for the European market but do want the benefits of that same market? Said in a different way: if they don't like the European rules they could choose to not compete in the European market.

Anyway, The good news (to you) is, that ms Kroes is leaving office for another post real soon now. The bad news (to you), is that she's leaving it for the post of foreign trade, which deals

They weren't forced to split up like ING and Royal Bank of Scotland, and those banks weren't even guilty of violating anti trust laws, it was their punishment for receiving government bailouts.

Anyway, the point I wanted to make was that I believe the perception of bias against American companies is an artefact of selective reporting. If evidence to the contrary were to come up, I suspect retaliations in the form of sanctions and/or WTO would follow.

As I understand it, the EC anti trust office acts when it receives complaints rather than going out searching for violations. I suppose it's possible they acted on a complaint filed by SAP, but that doesn't necessarily mean the EC had an anti American or pro SAP bias.

According to what was made public Oracle was made aware of the reservations of the EU commission, on which Oracle answered: "That they are essentially dumb farks that understand neither business nor open source".

For starters: This is not a clever approach to deal with the European commision. Oracle could sell MySQL and there would be no problem at all. But no, ol' Larry decided to get confrontational.

Further, the EU Commissions role is to ensure a competitive, fair and transparent market and to protect the consumer from abuse not to ensure Suns or Oracles profit, as the letter appears to imply.

For starters: This is not a clever approach to deal with the European commision. Oracle could sell MySQL and there would be no problem at all. But no, ol' Larry decided to get confrontational.

A confrontation is hard, but that's more of a showdown. What's even worse than a confrontation is the kind of death march you get when only your side is bleeding. The EU buereucracy isn't "losing" money in the same way Oracle does even though it's very wasteful.

This whole situation says much more about Ellison and Oracle than it does about the EU. Everyone already knew that the EU Commission marched to a different drum beat than the DOJ. It really doesn't matter whether the commission is right or wrong according to some external measure (i.e. everyone's personal opinion), they have the last word on this merger.
The mergers and acquisition group at Oracle should have known what they needed to give the commission before the deal was even publicly announced and then handed the commission everything they would need to make a rapid decision. That might have included Ellison deciding up front to jettison MySQL immediately after the acquisition. Right now the decision is being held up because Oracle has asked for more time to prepare a response.

Further, the EU Commissions role is to ensure a competitive, fair and transparent market and to protect the consumer from abuse not to ensure Suns or Oracles profit, as the letter appears to imply.

Paradoxical, isn't it.... that a bunch of Eurocrats are now appearing to be more concerned about maintaining a competitive market than the governing body of the USA which was founded on a platform of rejecting oligarchic rule by degenerate aristocrats and royalty in favor of democracy and equal opportunities for all. It's almost embarrassing to contemplate how low the the US senate had to sink to create this impression.

I don't think a competitive market is what will come of the EU blocking the merger. In fact if Sun goes down on its own, there will be less competition in the server market....

Without Oracle (or somebody's help), Sun is going down hard. They have contributed enormously to the computing industry, and unlike another OS vendor out there lots of their technology has been shared with the world.

From my perspective, I can only think the EU has alterior motives in blocking the Oracle/Sun merger.

I think the interesting fallout of this is that large corporations may find that it is too risky to operate as a large multinational corporation. The regulatory environments are too different. That's an interesting (and perhaps welcome) check on the size of a corporation, at least with the variety that operate both in the US and Europe.

OTOH, what with the distinction being less clear between private and public money in Europe, I can't help wonder if the EU isn't just protecting its own corporate intere

The article paraphrases a Gartner analyst, who points out that the Senators' letter "comes from a US point of view and doesn't take into account how the EU operates."

Combining that with your comment:

Further, the EU Commissions role is to ensure a competitive, fair and transparent market and to protect the consumer from abuse not to ensure Suns or Oracles profit, as the letter appears to imply.

The obvious implication is that the Senators in question (as well as the FTC) think that their job is to protect Sun's and Oracle's profits, not protect citizens from abuse. That says loads about the state of the US federal government right now. In addition, there's good reason to think that they didn't expect the public to find out about their actions, or if they did, interpret it as the senators protecting their jobs from the evil European socialists.

That is an observation you generally make. In the United States antitrust policy is not taken serious by business and institutions seem to get bullied. That is not the way you are expected to deal with a European competition regulator.

In particular you don't question the basics of competition law when they caught you.

Lobbying is specifically permitted via the first amendment: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

That said, I share your perception that the lobbying process is a corrupt one and that it almost entirely is the result of businesses and unions, who DO NOT HAVE THE RIGHT TO VOT

I have always felt that one huge step towards remedying this perception is to eliminate all limits on campaign contributions but to also permit campaign contributions ONLY from registered voters that are legally able to vote for the candidate. This would prohibit all political contributions from businesses and from unions, who cannot vote

Wrong.

It would prohibit all political contributions from corporations (legal entities that are creatures of law, including unions) but not "businesses", since businesses ar

go back to the original way of electing United States Senators (selection by the state legislatures)

You'd get something that looks a lot like the European commission; almost universally hated* by most citizens this side of the Atlantic for not being democratic enough. It's probably for similar reasons that you have the directly elected system you have now.

*I disagree, we voted for our national governments, they in turn each appointed a commissioner or two so the commission does broadly represent the people of Europe.

Lets see if I got this right:- The legislators of the 2nd largest western economy, pushed by lobbyists and in order to further the economic gains of companies based in their economic zone try to interfere in the internal affairs of the top largest western economy.

Sure, that's bound to work.

It's just as likely succeed as it would be if members of the European Parliament where trying to influence the US competition authorities with regards to European companies that have activities in US soil.

It's very simple, if Oracle wants to sell in the European markets they have to obey the European fair-competition rules. If they don't like them they can leave the market. In the same way, if any European company wants to sell in the US market they have to obey the US fair-competition rules or leave the market.

Honestly, Oracle having the legislators of a sovereign nation trying to influence the due process in an totally different economic and political block might very well be construed as an insult and have the opposite effect of what they intend.

What's next, will we have the People's Assembly of China send a letter to the European Commission saying "You guys over-reacted on the whole toxic paint on child's toys thing" ???

What's next, will we have the People's Assembly of China send a letter to the European Commission saying "You guys over-reacted on the whole toxic paint on child's toys thing" ???

I'm not sure if it's intentional, but you've made a hell of a good point right there.

I strongly suspect that the manufacturing capacity of Europe is rather a lot smaller than the total EU-wide demand for consumer goods (eg. childs toys). It follows that if the EC were to receive such a letter, they couldn't very well respond by saying "Fine. We'll embargo all your products" for very long - they'd drive the prices for a lot of items up so high that the politicians in member states would have Hell to pay.

I strongly suspect that the manufacturing capacity of Europe is rather a lot smaller than the total EU-wide demand for consumer goods (eg. childs toys). It follows that if the EC were to receive such a letter, they couldn't very well respond by saying "Fine. We'll embargo all your products" for very long - they'd drive the prices for a lot of items up so high that the politicians in member states would have Hell to pay.

Ah, but remember that they can blame it on those horrible Chinese and dastardly unelected Commission so they look blameless. It's very useful for the national-level politicians to have someone else to take the unpopular decisions for them so they can focus on taking decisions that people will vote for...

It follows that if the EC were to receive such a letter, they couldn't very well respond by saying "Fine. We'll embargo all your products" for very long - they'd drive the prices for a lot of items up so high that the politicians in member states would have Hell to pay.

In today's interconnected economy, any country that abruptly closed it's borders to trade would plunge into a deep depression. (Any country except North Korea, that is. They cleverly avoided this problem by self-destructing to a point where a deep depression would be an improvement.)

Of course the EC is never going to launch an all-out embargo against the USA - that would be insane. But a toll on Oracle products, perhaps? And then the trick is that the interconnected dependencies work both ways: The USA is

> It's very simple, if Oracle wants to sell in the European markets they have to obey the European> fair-competition rules. If they don't like them they can leave the market. In the same way, if any> European company wants to sell in the US market they have to obey the US fair-competition> rules or leave the market.

And what happens if the EU ignores it's own fair-competition rules and tries to block thesale for political purposes?

What most people believe is that someone (IBM, Microsoft) is paying the EU to "slow" down the deal. NOBODY in their right mind believes that the deal won't go through. So Oracle and Sun are using all the means they can to help get this deal done. Obviously someone on the other side is paying some very large amounts of cash to the EU to slow this down and Oracle and or Sun doesn't have the connections there that IBM/Microsoft have. It could also be HP. Actually now that I think about it, it could also b

Because there are tons of vested interests. SAP is based in the EU, so there's the possibility they're lobbying the EC on this one. One assumes that Oracle / Sun are lobbying US senators (and politicians in the EU for that matter?). The EU, as the article points out, works under different rules and with a different viewpoint - Oracle and Sun agreed to be bound by local laws when they entered the European markets. The EU probably has a political interest in seeming to stand up to the US, though you'd hope the regulators wouldn't be swayed into unprofessional behaviour by that. The US has an interest in avoiding a precedent where the EU has power over one of their companies. Sun and Oracle are probably trying to dodge awkward questions and hope for the EU to cave. Really, there's no reason to believe 100% that anyone is acting entirely in good faith here, especially given we don't have access to all the information.

We're seeing an interesting consequence of the increasingly interconnected world, though, in that we're reaping business advantages from setting up shop in multiple large markets but in turn companies are then subject to multiple jurisdictions regardless of their country of origin. It seems like the EU and US regulators working together on a decision might be more appropriate, given neither of them has absolute authority to give the go ahead. A co-operative solution to regulation decisions would make a certain amount of sense since it's de facto what we have now. It's surely in nobody's interests for the decision to be left hanging.

There's also at least in my opinion, a certain amount of over-estimation of MySQL because it was originally an European product.

Only the most die hard MySQL fanatics ever really believed that Oracle and MySQL were ever really going to be competitors. Any market share that MySQL ever has or ever will take away from Oracle is market share where Oracle was vastly inappropriate anyway. You'd be an idiot to run your web server on a LAOP box, and you'd be an idiot to stick your billion record banking system into

The EU is the reason I never bothered to code an SQL server or found a multinational hardware company from scratch. Mine would've been the coolest too, were it not for the EU. Stupid EU! Ruined my life....

Oracle aside, approving this deal means giving McNealy and Schwartz a huge cash bonus for taking a company with no debt and large amounts of cash on hand and destroying it. Something just stinks about the whole prospect IMHO. Also, if this deal DOES go through, I look for it to be the root cause of the future death of Oracle.

Sun was dead the minute that Jonathan "look, I'm a geek--I have a ponytail too!" Schwartz took it over. He has consistently and publicly done everything in his power to run down the stock price, in order to make it a tempting buyout option. A while ago, Sun had enough free cash on hand to take the company private again, and Schwartz refused to do so. "We're looking for a buyer" was the essence of his message. It has convinced me that he's not incompetent, as it widely believed, but ruthlessly competent at m

The day they announced the Oracle buyout, his blog was pulled off of the front page of blogs.sun.com. You can still get to it, but he's only had one post since then, and it was about how the Java Store (to be officially announced at JavaOne) will be the greatest thing in the history of computing.

I suspect he's lying as low as possible, to avoid irritating the EU further.

I don't know too many of the details here, but I'm glad someone is buying Sun. I'd heard rumors of a Sun/IBM merger a while back, and seen the signs that Sun was struggling financially. I think that an Oracle/Sun merger creates a better balance of power in the IT industry. Sun has done many good things for the Open Source community, including StarOffice, a truly open sourced Java, and OpenSolaris. However, unlike IBM who has prospered despite their many public contributions, Sun has suffered lately. There's

In other words the EU is more like the US then Europeans want to admit. They keep insisting "We are not one single country" even though it's clear to outside observers that's exactly what they have become, and as the central government starts regulating nitty-gritty details like how fast you can drive on your roads, or the universal drinking age, it will become self-evident.

BTW European readers:

Please don't call me an "American". Like the EU we are not only single country; we are many. Please call me "Vi

You are, in fact, an American. The US is a federation, meaning power is granted by the federal government to the lower states. So the government of the US determines whether a state can set a legal drinking age, or whether that is up to the US government itself. The European union is a union of sovereign states. It is the sovereign states that determine (together) which powers are granted to the union government. That's quite a big difference.

Another way to determine your nationality is to check your passport. Mine certainly doesn't say European Union like yours says United States;)

The US is a federation, meaning power is granted by the federal government to the lower states.

The entire U.S. legal establishment disagrees with you. The United States of America began as a confederation of sovereign states which adopted a Constitution that provided only specified powers to the federal government. The Tenth Amendment [wikipedia.org] to the Constitution is often given short shrift as a truism, but accurately sets out the relationship: if a power hasn't been granted to the federal government by the state

There is a USian collective consciousness. There is no European collective consciousness.

In your city, as in any city in the USA, lots of people read USA Today, watch Fox news and follow the NFL. Maybe you don't, but you could - your national media cover an agenda that matters to you.

No-one in Poland read Le Monde. No-one in Prague read The Sun. The show Livvagterne just won an Emmy, yet 95% of Europeans have never seen it, and never will. There is no European collective consciousness. And no amount of Brus

>>>There is a USian collective consciousness. There is no European collective consciousness.

Wait 20 or maybe 40 years, until the old people die out and the new generations start calling themselves "Europeans". In fact I'm already seeing this phenomenon taking hold with teenagers and college-aged adults, where they identify themselves as European and then I have to ask a followup question, "What part of Europe?"

>>>all those details you mention are not within the control of the european commission,

Neither is banning medical marijuana ir Claifornia, or setting-aside gun free zones around Washington schools, or mandating a national 55mph limit in Montana, or raising drinking age to 21 in Arkansas, and yet the U.S. has exercised all those things that wer never given to it. POINT: Just wait a decade or two, and the EU will also be regulating all sorts of thing "not within its control"

I think one concern is that allowing Oracle to control MySql is in a way asking the fox to guard the henhouse. If the solution is to wait for a fork of MySql, then you might as well force Oracle to divest MySql directly. Else you've effectively allowed Oracle to kill of the MySql brand.

Another thing is that Oracle formally announced the merger two weaks earlier in the US than in Europe, effectively making sure that the US authorities would be first to publish their verdict. As I read it in the newspaper, th

MySQL is OSS but the problem is that if you fork it you will end up with something that is quite difficult to support commercially because it will be gpl only, meaning that you can't use the mysql lib(And thus mysql itself) from closed source(Or just non gpl compatible) software.

This can't be emphasized enough: the issue is to protect MySQL as a viable option for proprietary, closed source applications. This is possible now by dual licensing, but Oracle has made no promises (that I know of) to keep the second license alive.

The easiest way to stop the EC from interfering is by not selling your products on the European market.
Use our market, obey our rules. Simply put. (It's a bit like the old American saying about 'eating cakes'...)

``why do we need a relational database to store our data? I find developing with Java / Hibernate against a relational database very time consuming and was it not that I invested so much time and effort in learning these technologies''

Eh? What does the fact that you find developing with Java and Hibernate time consuming have to do with the utility of relational databases?

I've also found developing with Java and Hibernate against relational databases time consuming, because (1) I had to learn a new framework

What the hell does a government think they are doing controlling a PUBLIC company? You want our products? Buy them. You don't want us to participate with your businesses? See ya.

As has been said above (and will probably be said below in various forms) - it cuts both ways. To rephrase that in line with your (mildly inflammatory) tone:

You want to sell in our country? Obey our laws. You don't want to obey our laws? See ya.

Unfortunately, it is awkward since its fairly hard to be a seriously large company these days without operating in both the states and in europe (q.f. the problems one company (I forget who) had when the Sarbanes-Oxley stuff came in, which contradicted French law, making it (at the time) technically impossible to continue).

The shareholders of Oracle/Sun would lynch the executives for pulling out of the biggest market place in the world massively damaging their own business.
Shareholders don't tend to approve of actions that will destroy the companies profits overnight

First, Oracle gets a substantial portion of its sales outside the US. So shutting down foreign sales would only hurt themselves.

Second, antitrust laws in the US got their origin from gross abuses of monopoly power by large corporations, which harmed both business competitors and consumers. It's not just a fable that this happens.

I don't really have an opinion on whether Oracle should swallow Sun or not, but if they do, then there would be only two big companies in the J2EE middleware business (Oracle and IB